Hi everyone!
As always, I’ll start this newsletter with a personal story.
Last month, I wanted to buy a bookcase for my home office. I wanted a modern, black bookcase that fit precisely between my desk and a closet.
I searched for hours but couldn’t find a bookcase with the exact dimensions I had in mind. So I decided to build one myself! I sketched various designs, kept revising, and asking my girlfriend for input. This continued for 2 weeks.
That’s when my girlfriend intervened. She said I needed to stop talking about the bookcase and either buy one or build the one I was designing. She was right. I was stuck in an endless loop of planning, and it was getting me nowhere.
The next day, I took my 2-year-old to the hardware store, bought some wood panels, and got going. I finished it the same evening, and I’m thrilled with the result.
Turns out, I don’t have that many books. So I added some additional items.
As a programmer and creator, I make things in the virtual world. Making something in the physical world is very exciting for me, and I’m proud of the result.
Anyway, sorry for going on about my bookcase. The key takeaway of this story is to watch out for “perpetual planning syndrome” or “analysis paralysis”. There’s only so much planning or analyzing you can do. At some point, you need to act.
What have you been planning/analyzing for too long? What can you act on?
Enjoy this month’s edition of the Simply Explained Newsletter!
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
Spacewar! game
This video game was developed in 1962 and is the first known game to be played on multiple computers. It’s a multiplayer game where two players control spaceships engaged in a dogfight around a star. Players have limited fuel and weapons, and the gravity of the star affects the ships, enabling them to use a gravity assist by flying near the star. The game was originally written for the DEC PDP-1 computer. You can play the original version on the Internet Archive, or you can play clones such as this one.
MapsFM
This website allows you to listen to a podcast episode about a specific place. Open the website, navigate to a place you want to learn more about, and it'll recommend you podcast episodes about that place. Very cool idea!
Coin flips are not 50-50, they're unfair!
We think coin tosses are completely random. However, a new study has found that coins are actually slightly more likely to land on the same side they started on (50.8%). This is because of a small wobble that is introduced into the coin as it flips. The smallest imperfections in the coin’s shape or weight can cause it to wobble as it flips. Think it’s insignificant? Betting on the outcome of a coin toss 1,000 times with a 50.8% chance would earn you $19 on average.
Wikenigma: the encyclopedia of unknowns
Wikenigma is an encyclopedia that documents fundamental gaps in human knowledge. Here are some examples:
- Where does Earth's water come from?
- How does photosynthesis work?
- What is dark energy (the thing that makes up 68% of the universe)?
- What makes your pee smell after eating asparagus, and why can't everyone smell it?
- Why doesn't the immune system attack a growing fetus?
- Why do we cry?
I love this website!
Is Apple's $129 Thunderbolt cable worth it?
Lumafield put the cable in a CT scanner and found some interesting things. It supports transfer speeds of up to 40Gbps and can charge devices up to 100W. The tiny connector contains a 10-layer circuit board with many chips on it, and Lumafield calls it a “stunning piece of precision engineering”. They also compare it to cheaper cables. A $5 cable promised a lot but was badly made. The Amazon Basics one is good, but supports slower transfer speeds. Conclusion? Buy the cable that meets your needs! If you need high speed and power delivery, Apple’s cable is worth it.
Amazon's new fulfillment center robots
Amazon employs 750,000+ robots in its warehouses and just introduced two new robotic solutions. Sequoia is a system that helps Amazon store and manage inventory faster and more accurately, while Digit is a bipedal robot that can move, grasp, and handle items in tight spaces. The new system can decrease order processing time by 25%, allowing Amazon to offer more products with same-day or next-day shipping. The robots work alongside humans and help them with dangerous and highly repetitive tasks.
👽 Space
NASA can't open its asteroid sample capsule
In the last edition, I wrote about NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission and how it returned an asteroid sample to Earth. NASA already shared an early analysis of the material that was on the outside of the capsule. But now they’re struggling to access the main sample container. Two of the 35 screws are stuck and the tools in the glovebox cannot open them. NASA is working on a new procedure to extract the sample, while still keeping it away from Earthly contaminants.
Carl Sagan's life detection experiment
In the 1970s, NASA’s Viking landers conducted an experiment on Mars to detect life. In the mid 2000s, scientists took samples from the Atacama desert and conducted the same experiment. It failed. Had the Viking spacecraft landed in the Atacama Desert, it would have missed the signatures of life! In 1992, a group of scientists led by Carl Sagan conducted a similar experiment with the Galileo spacecraft. Could it detect life on Earth while it was performing a close flyby of our planet? The answer is yes! The craft detected a lot of narrow band radio signals that could only come from a technological civilization. This is a “control experiment” and it provided us with a roadmap for how to search for alien life in the future.
🕵️♂️ Privacy (or lack thereof)
23andMe hacked?
A hacker has leaked the genetic data of millions of 23andMe users. The hacker likely exploited the “DNA Relatives” feature, which allows users to see the data of other users whose genetic data matches theirs. This feature is opt-in, but if enabled on a user’s account, it could have allowed the hacker to access the data of multiple users. This breach can have a significant impact on the people whose data has leaked. Genetic data can identify people and predict their risk of developing certain diseases. The company also started selling anonymized genetic data to GSK to help speed up drug development.
How Mastercard sells transaction data
Mastercard has a database of 125 billion purchases transactions and sells that data to third parties. In 2021, Mastercard's Data & Services division had 25 data services products that generated over $5 billion in revenue. All data is anonymized, but that's not a great way to protect privacy. A 2015 study concluded that it could uniquely identify an individual with data of just 4 purchases.
🏥 Health & Medicine
Video: why you shouldn't bring metal into an MRI machine
An MRI machine uses a strong magnetic field to create detailed images of the inside of the body. It's perfectly safe, as long as you remove all metal objects from your body before entering the MRI room. The strong magnetic field turns any large piece of metal into a projectile that can hurt people and damage the MRI machine. This video showcases the strength of the magnetic field with a paperclip.
Monkey with pig kidney lives for 2 years!
On average, 16 people die every day from the lack of available organs for transplant. A possible solution is xenotransplantation: take organs from animals and transplant them into humans. This is very hard because our immune system attacks the foreign organ. A new technique uses CRISPR to edit the DNA of organs so they’re more likely to be accepted by the human body. In this experiment, 15 monkeys received kidneys from pigs, and one monkey lived for 758 days with the new organ. Active 2: It is worth mentioning that the monkey's immune system was only slightly suppressed, which is uncommon.